I would agree with Travis that if a typical American is likely to discriminate against any accent at all, it's most likely to be one of a highly stigmatized area within the US. Having lived in and traveled to lots of different parts of America and having been exposed to countless foreign accents (especially here in California, but also in the pretty international-heavy Dallas-Forth Worth metro area where I lived for several years as a kid) I would say Americans are usually pretty open and curious, or at least respectful, of foreign accents. I get the feeling this is common in many countries, where native, stigmatized regional accents are often much more discriminated against as compared to foreign accents. At least that was my experience in Argentina and South America, where my obviously foreign-accented Spanish never made me feel discriminated against (and in fact was often received positively...they like that you made the effort to learn their language) while I occasionally saw people with regional Argentine accents get snotty treatment from other Argentines, based solely on their accent.
Kirk, one thing is that it seems here that in the case of views here its not really the accent itself, rather what regional area an accent associates one with, at least here. Views of, say, Texan accents, are just really reflecting anti-southern and anti-Texan sentiments, as a whole. The image of the South and Texas here is quite bad, to say the very least, and tends to be associated with things that are generally thought of as being the antithesis of, well, Wisconsin's general image of itself. Conservatism (to the point of outright reaction), religious fundamentalism, general ignorance (I'm not speaking of language standards here, but rather on a more general level), and so on.
The North/South divide in the U.S. definitely manifests itself most visibly when it comes to accent, although I've met some Texans that don't have the stereotypical Texan accent.
We here in the NYC metro area often have a bit of a snotty attitude when it comes to southern accents. This, of course, isn't fair, but it's often true.
As far as that suspicion of foreign accents goes, I don't think it's true for my part of the country. New Jersey is one of, if not the most diverse state in the country. You'll run into many different accents here depending on where you are or what city you're in.
Damian wrote " Metropolitan areas like New York City must have a more liberal and mature "European" outlook I reckon."
Damian, this is one of these statements that is true on a certain level of analysis. There is, indeed, less anti-immigration sentiment in New York and Washington D.C. than in most of the rest of the nation, and kinky, avant-garde fashion shows are just as popular in New York as they are in Paris.
However , even in New York, foreigners tend to assimilate within two or three generations. Just last week, I heard an Italian-American in New York on a radio talk show say that when he was 16 years old his dad drove him to Calvary Military Cemetary in Queens New York and told him "This is to remind you that you are not an Italian but an American!"
Overall, the United States is a very homogeneous country . For better or for worse, it was very homogeneous in 1980 and 1984 when it elected Ronald Reagan to the presidency. He won almost every state. It was almost that way in the 2004 election. Even in the blue states there were sizeable red or purple regions. Canada has been less so giving Quebeckers, Innuits and Native ("First Nations") people more self-government but I have even met many Canadians who, on a private level, disapprove of speaking any languages in Canada other than English.
I'd say there are common threads that link us all, but I wouldn't go so far as Brennus in saying that the U.S. is very homogenous. Take that North/South dialectal and cultural divide I was talking about earlier.
The country is too big and the population too diverse to call it homogenous.
mjd,
Hello. Nice to hear from you. However, I must comment a little bit on your last post... First of all, are you old enough to remember the 1980 and '84 presidential elections? Northern and Southern voters alike went for Ronald Reagan by a huge margin. This doesn't disprove that there are some differences between the Northern and Southern United States but it says that, bottom line, they might not be all that significant .
Secondly, when I've watched Discovery television programs on the U.S. Marines, it turns out that the poor sections of New York City seem to supply them with just as many recruits as the poor rural South does.
I would definitely not call the USA homogenous...like mjd said there are common threads that link us all, or most of us, but 'homogenous' is not a word I'd use to describe the US. Measuring the sheer number of red versus blue states is also quite a bad way to measure homogeneity, as the country was nearly divided half-half in terms of actual population numbers. But, let's please not get into elections, anyway.
"although I've met some Texans that don't have the stereotypical Texan accent."
I would definitely agree with that. As I said before I lived for several years as a kid in the Dallas-Forth Worth metro area and while some had noticeably Texan accents, the 'metroplex', as it's known, mostly sounded like what could vaguely be described as General American. Since the DFW metro area has had a huge influx of nonnative Texans (such as my family when we lived there) over the years, non-Texan sounding accents were quite common, even the norm, in my memory. I remember in my 4th grade year (so, I was 9-10) it being distinctly odd to me to have a teacher that year who sounded Texan, as none of the teachers in my other years (I was there from kindergarten to 5th grade) had distinctly Texan accents in my memory. I do remember the minority of kids with a hint of Texan speech being teased for their accents, further pointing to the fact that non-Texan speech was perceived as the norm. Thinking back, at times that did unfortunately include me on the teasing end...I was secure in the superiority of my accent derived from my native-Californian parents, a security reinforced by the fact that most of my classmates and peers didn't have noticeably Texan accents...hey, I was a kid and wasn't linguistically enlightened yet!
As Travis commented, accent discrimination isn't necessarily a discrimination against the accent in particular, but mostly the people it's perceived to represent. Of course, that's what I was really referring to when I was talking about accent discrimination, altho I suppose it is theoretically possible to simply dislike an accent's features while still holding its speakers in high regard.
Kirk - I agree. I think there is variation happening now. I hear variations in speech sometimes even now, particularly Victorians compared to the rest of Australia. You'd think maybe the media would have some impact in unifying the accent.
Ah, as I suspected, variations are already starting to emerge in AuE. That's interesting you bring up the influence of media...because it would seem to make sense that the media would have an influence, but a lot of linguistic studies have been done on that very topic and have overwhelmingly found that the media have no influence on how people speak. Apparently the reason lies in the fact that no one speaks back to a TV or radio, and personal human interaction is how language changes spread (because people are constantly imitating others, whether they're conscious or unaware of it). What the media do seem to do, however, is increase familiarity with different speech varieties. I think, on a personal level, the best example of the media's lack of influence on real speakers may be found in the fact that I can watch BBC America all day (it is a channel I regularly watch...tho I've never done it for a whole day), and as much as I like the BBC and the UK, will not come away speaking any different, yet I undoubtedly will've learned or become familiar with a few new British phrases or ways of pronouncing things that I wouldn't normally encounter in my daily life here.
Yes, that's true. We have a lot of American and English TV programmes here and it hasn't affected accents here, but rather given us the ability to get familiar with the American and English culture. I think over time there will be variations though, as I said, I'm detecting them now. I'm interested to see what happens in say 200-300 years from now, but I will be long gone by then I guess.
You guess? I'm bloody sure I won't be here and I don't have to guess.;-)
I hear what you're saying Brennus, but I don't think politics (you alluded to the Reagan victories) is the best indicator of whether the country is homogenous or not. Perhaps on some social and political issues, but culture and language goes much deeper than that.
Cultural and linguistic differences that Americans perceive amongst them selves are not necessarily seen by foreigners. In fact, they are usually not. Just as most Americans see no differences between a Greek from Athens and a Greek from Crete, Macedonia or Rhodes, most foreigners see no differences between an American from the northern, southern or western Unites States. I have especially noticed this among Mexicans I've talked with. They consider any talk about the difference of English as spoken in Washington State and English as spoken in Texas to be just nitpicking even though to many of us something like "judge" and "jedge" or "pretty little thing" and "pertty little theng" is a noticeable differences.
is a noticeable differences = are noticeable differences. .
